WASHINGTON — The match-up between President Obama and Bill O’Reilly in a pre-Super Bowl interview Sunday was rougher than some of the action on the field.
The president fended off a barrage of sharp questions in the testy 10-minute Fox News Channel interview, including why he didn’t fire Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius after the botched ObamaCare rollout.
“I’m a taxpayer and I’m paying Kathleen Sebelius’ salary and she screwed up . . . and you’re not holding her accountable,” O’Reilly charged.
“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” Obama shot back, adding that he didn’t want to change HHS secretaries “when we’re in midstream” of implementing the massive health-care law.
O’Reilly then asked if the broken promise that people could keep health plans they like was “the biggest mistake of your presidency?’’
Obama responded, “Oh, Bill, you’ve got a long list of my mistakes of my presidency.”
The president also was asked whether campaign politics played a role in the White House’s delay in blaming terrorists for the deadly attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya.
“That is inaccurate,” he insisted.
Some of the toughest questions were aboutWhen asked whether there was White House involvement or “mass corruption” in the Internal Revenue Service targeting of Tea Party groups, Obama answered, “There were some boneheaded decisions — [but] not even a smidgen of corruption.”
The president accused the news network of focusing on his administration’s missteps.
Midway through the Super Bowl, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got into the act, tweeting, “It’s so much more fun to watch Fox when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked #SuperBowl.’’